


the apocalypse (this is it)

by above_the_fold



Series: radioactive (a pacific rim au) [1]
Category: Mission: Impossible (Movies), Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Angst, Benthan endgame, Elements of Canon, F/M, Going to War, Hurt No Comfort, Let's be Jaeger Pilots, Original Character Death(s), Pre-Canon, Revenge, Some made-up Jaeger names, War, lots of em - Freeform, this will be a series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-19
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-14 18:40:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29546664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/above_the_fold/pseuds/above_the_fold
Summary: "Only the dead have seen the end of war." -PlatoOr, no one is exempt from the Kaiju War.-Mission: Impossible/Pacific Rim crossover heavily inspired by MadMadame's excellent fic "Of Monsters and Men." First in a series. Fic and series titles from "Radioactive" by Imagine Dragons.
Relationships: Ethan Hunt/Julia Meade, William Brandt/Ilsa Faust
Series: radioactive (a pacific rim au) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2170752
Kudos: 3





	the apocalypse (this is it)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Of Monsters and Men](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17273234) by [MadMadame](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MadMadame/pseuds/MadMadame). 



> we're trying something new boys
> 
> (this has honestly been in the works for so long, though)

Ethan Hunt is thirty-two when his wife divorces him.

It’s a calm and almost painfully mutual affair. Julia moves in with a friend from work until the papers are finalized, leaving Ethan to pack his minimal things in her absence. They still talk—never in person, and never for long—and for a while it feels strangely _normal,_ because it’s the way they hardly talk when he’s away on mission, and then he remembers he hasn’t _been_ on a mission in three years, not since the wedding.

The feeling dissolves. And then they’re in court one bright but blistering cold morning at the end of January, signing the papers and making things official, and it’s like the feeling was never even there to start with.

It would have hurt less if it had been a nasty, angry thing, but it isn’t. That’s never how things have gone between them. Julia stays on as a psychiatric nurse at Mount Sinai, still working her way through med school, and Ethan flees back to D.C., signs back onto the CIA’s active-duty roster, and works hard enough to numb the pain that drinking can’t. Maybe their divorce wasn’t as mutual as he thought. The fallout isn’t much of a fallout at all, truthfully. The politely detached messages gradually end between them; he quietly unfollows her once her Facebook wall begins to fill with pictures of some bearded guy named Erik. He goes to Shanghai, Guayaquil, Sydney—more and more missions to help him forget.

They’ve been divorced for seven months on K-Day. Ethan calls her on his way home early from work and forces down the panic when he gets a busy signal. There’s bad traffic on the 495, so he tries again once they’re stopped, and again once he’s home in front of the TV, gazing unseeingly at the terrifying headlines out of California. On a whim, he checks online. 

According to her Facebook wall, she’s been in San Francisco for three weeks. Some nurses’ exchange program.

He doesn’t make it to the bathroom, and the vomit stains his knees when they eventually give out.

(He leaves for Alaska two years later without looking back.)

* * *

Luther Stickell is thirty-eight when ~~the~~ his world ends.

His wife finally calls from somewhere near Oakland on the morning of August 11. She sounds hollow, resigned. The kids are gone, gone, gone. They’d just left her parents’ house in Highland Park when _something_ tore through the neighborhood, gone quick as it’d come. She no longer knows where she is—the ruins all look identical—and she tells him the dust and smoke are rising too thick to see anyhow.

“It was some kind of _monster,_ Luther,” she sobs, sounding frustrated and terrified and exhausted. “It was so _big_ …”

“You need to run, honey,” he says, as steadily as he can around the hand he’s got covering his mouth. He shakes violently with the force of his own silent tears. “Find someone and get out of there!”

But his wife is too smart for him; he knew this when he married her. “What good will it do, baby. I don’t know where I am or where to go.” Something—rubble, probably—crunches loudly under her feet. “And the kids… God, Luther, our _kids_ …”

She starts to cry again. It’s all Luther can do to cry with her. “They just disappeared, I couldn’t—I couldn’t _see_ them, I couldn’t hear, I didn’t _know_ …”

Her breath hitches suddenly. There’s a faint noise on her end, growing steadily louder. Luther’s heart sinks as he identifies the roar of military jets. They both know what’s coming—how else do you take down a monster as tall as the heavens?

“I love you,” he tells her fiercely, determined to make her hear. “I love you, I love you, you hear me? Can you hear me?”

He has to, he never got to tell his son, his daughters, he needs her to know that he—

She never says it back. There is a shrill, deafening sound, then silence.

Luther _knows._ He knows. The line stays connected even after she’s gone; he waits, alone in their house in Virginia, frozen in place with the tears still heavy on his face. After two minutes and thirty-three seconds, he ends the call, and the phone shatters as he hurls it blindly to the floor.

(He’ll join the Jaeger Program with zero intention of surviving it—just so long as he can take one of those bastard Kaiju with him, and see his wife and family again.)

* * *

Lindsey Farris is fifteen when K-Day comes.

Her father shakes her awake and rushes into the twins’ room before she can ask him what’s wrong. Then her mother appears, clutching a pair of Lindsey’s shoes in her trembling hands, and shoves her out the door before she can ask her where they’re going. To church, it turns out, like everyone else in small-town Oklahoma that day. Lindsey sits at the end of their pew and stares straight ahead as Reverend Ellis fiddles with the radio they use for church concerts.

_“...Earthquake right in the heart of the San Francisco Bay. We’ve also been getting strange reports of something moving under the Golden Gate Bridge.”_

The radio stations play it back on the hour, every hour, even after the monster surfaces and heads for Sacramento. Her parents cling to one another as reports come in of a military intervention at Fort Baker—Owen is likely there, having just completed his pilot’s training at Edwards Air Force Base in the spring. All around her, the people of Lone Grove, Oklahoma tremble and weep. Some pass their cell phones around to those with relatives long-distance. Lindsey holds her sister in her lap and does not cry or shake (though the sight of her parents very nearly breaks her.) Nobody prays.

Her brother does not come home. So begins the end of the world.

Lindsey submits her application for the Jaeger Program just after she graduates high school, stowing her plans to attend Texas A&M on a pre-veterinary track. She is determined: if she can’t make Ranger, then she’ll land high enough to be allowed to train as an officer, K-Science division.

She and the twins had watched Brawler Yukon take down Karloff in April, crowded around the little television at the foot of her parents’ bed. Lieutenant Phelps is nowhere near as attractive as Dr. Phelps, but the light that spills across their shoulders as they emerge victorious from the head of their giant machine makes them the two most beautiful people on Earth. Six-year-old Hadley declares that they must be angels; Lindsey’s grateful that she doesn’t see their parents’ pained smiles.

Her mother is furious when her enlistment notice arrives, a week after she turns eighteen—a perverse sort of late birthday gift. “Not even God can save that girl,” Lindsey hears her say to her father later that night, when they think she’s asleep.

She closes a hand around her brother’s dog tags where they dangle beneath her t-shirt, cool against her skin, and sends up a short prayer. Just in case.

* * *

William Brandt is twenty-seven when he meets Ilsa Faust.

He flies on K-Day with the rest of his squadron and earns the distinct honor of being the only one to come back. Castro, Barrett, Singh, Farris—all missing and presumed dead before three o’clock. The first thing he does upon landing at Fort Baker’s ruined airstrip is throw up, stumbling on his hands and knees. He can’t see a thing through the sweat that drips into his eyes, already blurry with tears. He’s led off the tarmac by a man bearing a colonel’s rank and given six hours to rest while everyone else decides just what in the hell to do next.

Call in reinforcements, apparently—the British Royal Air Force arrives in the early hours of August 11, merging ranks with the remaining soldiers at Fort Baker to await orders from the president. Brandt sleeps right through it and is startled awake by a literal boot in the ass, just before one in the morning. A young woman stands over him in the blue-gray RAF uniform, foot still outstretched.

“Staff Sergeant Brandt?” 

“ _Yes?_ ” he snaps, rubbing the sore spot even as he scrambles up to attention. She can’t be any older than him, and she doesn’t appear to rank any higher, but every part of her is steel—her words and her posture (though he’s a head taller) but especially her gaze, the same color as her uniform. She demands his respect without trying.

“Colonel Hunley sent me to find you. The next assault is starting.”

They sprint side by side out into the stifling midnight heat. Brandt fights like hell to keep down the fear and nausea once he inhales the city air, an acrid mix of smoke and sea breeze and death. His battered jet sits on the tarmac, refueled and ready. The other woman continues at a run toward a group of British officers further up—he figures it’s the last he’ll ever see of her.

“What’s your name?” he yells on impulse after her. If nothing else, she’ll have someone to ask after her once this all ends. She’s a long way from home, after all.

She turns, the steel visibly softening for a fraction of a second, and doesn’t bother with rank. “Ilsa Faust!”

And they do see each other again. They fly together that entire hellish week, reunited on August 16 in Los Angeles once the nukes are finally authorized and the monster has fallen. In 2015 they are the first choice of newly-appointed Marshal Alan Hunley to begin Drift testing under Dr. Claire Phelps’ new Pons system. One thing leads to another—blame it on the testing, perhaps—and before long it’s more the sweet, shared memories they’re fighting the urge to chase, rather than the horrifying ones.

They, along with the Phelps, are the face of the Jaeger Program: the jaded American pilot and the mysterious former MI6 operative. It makes no sense to anyone but themselves. 

* * *

Benji Dunn is thirty-one when he submits an application for the Jaeger Academy.

He’s not stupid; he knows the propaganda targets men and women a decade his junior, but it’s 2020, and the Kaiju War is getting worse. The image currently projected by the PPDC is one that says _We need all the help we can get,_ and, what the hell. He’ll never qualify for piloting, but with an Oxford degree in computer science, he just might earn a spot in J-Tech if he’s good enough.

His sister Maggie is a K-Science officer, currently stationed in Anchorage since Knifehead’s attack. Last year he’d gone to see her while she’d still been in Lima, watched her receive an award from the Peruvian government for her team’s work on the environmental effects of Kaiju Blue radiation. They’d gone out to dinner after the ceremony and the conversation had naturally shifted, as it always seemed to these days, to his joining the Jaeger Program.

“They could use you, love. J-Tech’s always looking for more programmers, especially with the Mark-5 rollout—”

The Mark-fucking-5. It’s been four years since the Jaeger Program’s inception and here they are producing the _fifth generation_ of their war machines.

“What makes you think I couldn’t drive a Jaeger?” he squawks indignantly, but privately he knows it wouldn’t be a bad deal, him designing the Jaegers while she studies their enemies. Maggie looks delighted at the thought of him even considering applying, and the warmth that that sight brings him solidifies his resolve.

He calls her the day he receives an enlistment notice—nothing congratulatory about it—and they both embarrass themselves by crying. In truth, the clusterfuck that was Knifehead’s engagement has him scared, even as he resolutely finishes packing up his mousehole London apartment. Ranger Farris was only twenty-two; word is her partner is too fucked up to return to the Program and is set to receive an honorable discharge any day now, once he leaves hospital. The latest headlines leave Benji slightly nauseated. He remembers how Ranger Hunt always smiled in the press photos.

“What’s going to happen to Gipsy Danger?” he asks cautiously. Maggie has talked fondly about Ranger Farris in the past; she’d apparently held a curious fascination for K-Science’s work. “I understand if you can’t, um. If that’s classified.”

Maggie exhales, a tad shakily. “Dunno. Everyone knows about Eth—Ranger Hunt’s discharge, obviously. J-Tech reckons they can salvage Gipsy, but it’s not like…”

“Like she’ll be operable,” Benji murmurs, finishing for her. Every Jaeger needed two pilots. He glances around his now mostly-empty flat as he listens to Maggie collect herself on the other end of the line. He knows they're both a little afraid. There’s no telling now.

There’s no turning back, either.

**Author's Note:**

> for clarity-
> 
> Jim and Claire Phelps are the equivalent of Lieutenant Sergio D'Onofrio and Dr. Caitlin Lightcap from Pacific Rim! They are the first Jaeger pilots; they drive the first Jaeger ever created, Brawler Yukon. In addition, Claire Phelps is the mastermind behind the Pons system and Drift testing (as Lightcap is in canon.) 
> 
> Kudos/comments/thoughts definitely appreciated!!!


End file.
